It Doesn't Have to Be This Way: The Infuriating Reality of Womanhood

[ismnotwasm]

This is a long, well written essay; what I found interesting is that she is a 'recreational pole dancer', although she doesn't exactly identify as stripper and it doesn't matter anyway. I love the opening paragraph especially, but the whole thing is worth reading.

I love women. And as I get older, my life is becoming increasingly about them. I dance with women, I speak with women, I am coached, sponsored by, and counseled by women. I meet them for coffee. I talk to them about sex. I ask them for advice. I hold them while they cry. I love the deep feelings. And the competition. The struggle to be seen and held. The intimacy. The complication. The ability to heal.

My experience at S-Factor has deepened this for me, surely, but on some level, it's always been this way for me. I remember reading Anita Diamant's The Red Tent in middle school and being just obsessed with the vivacious, earthy, female community of the novel. It was this raucous irreverent crew separated from everyone else just because they were female. They were special, ancient, and secret. Aunts, cousins, daughters, grandmas, sitting on moss and bleeding in a tent in the desert, while rubbing each other's feet with oil and cackling about their husbands. Oh my god. I wanted to eat it. I wanted to be there.

It echoed for me. Because even as a middle-schooler, I knew that being a woman does feel like that. Quarantined and venerated. Ever since I went through puberty, I've felt like I was a part of a club that everyone was obsessed with and also couldn't wait to abuse. On the public bus, in a piazza in Italy, I remember those first pre-teen moments, when people started watching me. The power you're gifted just by being a woman. It comes without your permission, and it's heady, potent.

But the lack of control over that power; it comes too. The first time you feel it, it's both. It's neither. You don't have tools to deal with it yet. You didn't ask for it. It just arrived. On that same trip to Europe, just as I started to glow under male attention, someone in Turkey tried to buy me from my family. My parents joked. The man was serious. I was 12.

http://jezebel.com/it-doesnt-have-to-be-this-way-the-infuriating-reality-1537068838